Senior in years to the Brontës was the biographer of Charlotte, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell. Mrs. Gaskell's fame was won chiefly as a novelist, but, both for its intrinsic merits and as a memorial of a most interesting literary friendship, her _Life of Charlotte Brontë_ deserves mention. If not equal to the best biographies in the language, it is worthy of a place in the class nearest to that small group. It gives a delightful impression both of the subject of the memoir and of her biographer. There was sufficient difference between the two to make Mrs. Gaskell's generous appreciation peculiarly creditable to her. Two contemporaries of the same sex, reared amidst men closely akin in character, and confronted, as _Mary Barton_ and _Shirley_ prove, by similar social problems, could hardly present a greater contrast than there is between Charlotte Brontë and Mrs. Gaskell; the former austere, intense, prone to exaggeration and deficient in humour; the latter genial, balanced, and among the most successful of female humourists. The contrast extended to the personal appearance of the two women. Charlotte Brontë was plain and diminutive, while in her youth Mrs. Gaskell was strikingly beautiful. The events of Mrs. Gaskell's life were almost wholly literary. Her first novel, _Mary Barton_, published in 1848, remains to this day probably her best known, though not her most perfect book. It deals with the industrial state of Lancashire during the crisis of 1842, and it won, by its vivid and touching picture of the life of the poor, the admiration of some of the most distinguished literary men of the time. The subject was gradually drawing more attention. The evils which begot the socialism of Robert Owen and drew the protests of Carlyle and of Ebenezer Elliott had been brought into prominence by the Luddite riots and by Chartism. Most of the novelists were awakening to a sense of them. Disraeli had anticipated Mrs. Gaskell; and Kingsley as well as Charlotte Brontë followed her. The treatment varies greatly. Mrs. Gaskell, like Kingsley, has much more sympathy with socialism than Charlotte Brontë has. The social aspects of _Mary Barton_ caused it to be admired and praised on the one hand, and to be censured on the other, for reasons outside the domain of art; but on the whole they certainly increased its popularity. The success of _Mary Barton_ won for Mrs. Gaskell an invitation from Dickens to contribute to _Household Words_, and some of her best work, including _Cranford_ (1851-1853) and _North and South_ (1854-1855), first appeared there. She was also a contributor to the _Cornhill_, where her last story, _Wives and Daughters_, was running when she died, with startling suddenness, in 1865.